The Outsider (26 page)

The outsider had given the ewe his leg to brace against, and now he squatted down in the straw next to her rolling head. He threaded his fingers through the puff of wool between her ears, stroking her, over and over. “Why don’t she holler?”

Rachel’s gaze was held fast by those long fingers, the way they moved tenderly, almost lovingly over the ewe’s head. But then, he touched his gun like that, she thought. And, once, her mouth.

“Sheep can bear a lot of pain,” she finally said. “But I think more than anything they keep quiet because they don’t want the coyotes and wolves to know when they’re giving birth.”

From the look on the outsider’s face, he appeared to be suffering right alongside the ewe. It was funny, but watching a lamb come had sometimes twisted up Ben’s insides like that, too. Maybe, Rachel thought, a woman understood better that birthing was just naturally going to be hard. That with life came suffering.

Benjo trotted up, bringing with him the hook and a piece of gunny sacking, just as the ewe lurched back onto her feet. She gave a mighty strain, her rear end jerking sharply. The
lamb seemed to dive out of the womb, feet and nose first, landing in the muddy straw, a glistening, steaming nubby yellow sack of bones.

Rachel tore the membrane, peeling it away from the lamb’s nose and mouth, laughing as she heard the squeaky
maa
that came with the little one’s first breath. Her own boy was right there to hand her the sacking, so that she could quickly dry off the lamb’s ears and keep them from freezing.

The ewe just stood there,
baa
ing frantically and shaking her hind end, as if she wasn’t quite sure what all had been happening to her. Rachel began to fear she’d turn out to be one of those mothers who refused to accept her baby. But then, as if some wheel finally clicked over in her brain, she turned, stretching her nose out toward her lamb. She sniffed, and then began to lick the sticky yellow slime off its rump, making loud noises that almost drowned out the night wind, the rustling straw, and all the bleats and
baa
s of the other expectant mothers.

“And here all this time I’ve been worried you were going to make
me
do that,” the outsider said.

“The night is young yet, Mr. Cain.”

He laughed, then his gaze fell back down to the ewe, who was now trying to nudge her lamb to its feet by pushing up on its little rump. A gentleness she had never seen before came over his harsh face. He looked very young, she thought, and . . . surprisingly, the word that came to her mind was
happy.
He looked happy.

“M-Mem?”

She turned, swallowing down the lump that clogged her throat. She took the sheep hook that Benjo handed her. She slid it under the lamb’s belly, in front of its hind legs, lifting the nubby yellow bundle of bones until it was dangling from the end of the pole, nose to the ground.

She offered the baby in this fashion to its mother, letting her see and smell it. But the ewe suddenly whirled and ran into the middle of the corral, scattering the whole rest of the drop band into a bleating, tail-humping panic.

“Oh, she sure enough is a flighty mother!” Rachel exclaimed in exasperation. “See if you and MacDuff can shoo her back over this way, Benjo.”

Her boy, with both the dog’s and the outsider’s help, chased the ewe back over to the lamb. The ewe stretched out her neck, sniffing hard to be sure the baby was hers. Slowly Rachel backed up, the lamb dangling at the end of the pole. She made soft bleating noises low in her throat, a
beh-beh-beh
, to encourage the flighty mother. And the ewe followed them warily, sniffing the whole way, into the sheds.

The sheds, built long and low, had a mixture of straw and sawdust spread over the floor, and were divided inside into a honeycomb of pens, called jugs, that were just large enough to hold a ewe and her lamb. Once snug in its new home, the newborn pushed itself up onto its wobbly, knobby-kneed legs. Using gentle nudges, Rachel guided it to its mother’s teat for its first meal. She couldn’t linger to watch, though, for she could hear Benjo hollering that another lamb was coming.

They hit a flurry of birthings after that, so that she and the outsider had to work separately. She watched him, though, whenever she got the chance. Johnny Cain, man-killer, seemed to settle easily into the sheep midwifery business. His low and lazy drawl soothed the ewes like a lullaby, and the touch of his hands was gentle and sure.

Her eyes often sought out her boy as well, and her chest tightened with a bittersweet ache when she thought how proud of him his father would be. He seemed to be everywhere at once, handing them sheep hooks and pieces of sacking, scooping up the birth mess from the newly delivered
ewes. And in between jugging the babies and their dams, they all took turns at forking hay into the pens and giving the new mothers buckets of water sweetened with molasses.

Only once did Rachel have to pick up a small wet yellow bundle and carry it outside the corral fence to the place that, one particularly bad spring, Ben had taken to calling the “bone pile.” For it was inevitable that, even in the good years, some of the lambs died, and they always lost a few of the ewes as well.

Still, as Rachel carried the dead lamb over to the bone pile, she turned her head away so that the men, her son and Johnny Cain, wouldn’t see her woman’s tears.

RACHEL CLASPED THE SHEEP HOOK
between her thighs so that she could use both hands to gather up her hair and work it into a braid.

Her hair had been falling into her face all night, when it wasn’t being twisted into knots by the wind. She scolded herself for not pinning it up and covering it properly with a prayer cap. It had been prideful of her—and wicked, because she had done it for him.

“Rachel.”

Her name, coming at her out of the night and in such a tone of urgency, startled her so that the sheep hook went clattering to the ground.

He had come up close behind her, and as she whirled, her flying braid wrapped around his throat. He reached up, his long fingers tangling in the thick loose plait. His fingers tightened their grip, pulling her closer. His head dipped, and his lips parted slightly as if he would kiss her.

It was as if she had roped him, roped him with her hair.

He let her go and took a step back. “We got trouble,” he said.

Rachel’s eyes flew to the road, expecting the trouble to belong to him. But then she saw that he’d already gone back into the lambing sheds, and she had to run to catch up with him.

The outsider led her to the jug where they’d put the first lamb born that night, the first lamb of spring. The little black-faced baby stood alone, ignored by his mother, his knobby legs shaking, his back humped up, eyes sunken, ears drooping.

“Oh, he’s starving, the poor little
bobbli.
” Rachel squeezed into the jug with the lamb and his dam, stooping to keep from hitting her head on the sloping roof. “This flighty ewe of yours is bumming her lamb.”

“Flighty ewe of
mine?
I don’t recall marrying her.”

“You hadn’t ought to spurn her to her face like that, sir. Given how she adores you.” And indeed, at the sound of his voice, the ewe had turned her head to look up at the outsider with an expression on her sweet clown’s face that was positively besotted. “Help me to tip her over onto her rump, if you don’t mind,” Rachel said.

“I don’t. But I ain’t speaking for her feelings on the matter.”

The drawling words were full of teasing laughter, and although she smiled back at him, there was a tightness in her chest now akin to fear. She thought of how his fingers had felt in her hair. No wonder the Bible said an uncovered woman ought to be shorn. It was a wickedness, what he had been about to do. What she had almost let him do.

They wrestled together with the stubborn ewe, their hips and shoulders bumping in the enclosed space, trying to upend her so that her baby could nurse. Once, Rachel’s loosening braid curled around his arm, and she nearly upended
her own self jerking away from him, but if he noticed he gave no sign.

When they got the ewe sitting up on her rump, Rachel worked her teats to get the milk to flow. Soon the shed filled with the slurping sounds of hungry suckling, the slap of a little black nose against the bag. They didn’t let go of the ewe, though, until her baby’s belly bulged with milk.

The outsider stepped aside to allow Rachel to precede him. But she couldn’t go past him without brushing up against him, and her unruly braid caught in the buttons of his coat. She spent a frantic moment trying to tug herself free, while he said, “If you’d just quit wriggling like a cut worm, I can . . .” And once again she had to endure the feel of his fingers in her hair.

When they were safely, and separately, outside the cramped jug, he straightened to his full height, bracing his good hand into the small of his back. He rolled his shoulders, easing out a deep groan. “I could stretch for a mile, if it weren’t for the walk back,” he said. “This is a downright indecent hour to be working. There’s only one thing a body ought to be doing this time of night.”

“And just what is . . .” A blush rose in her cheeks, as her head caught up with her tongue.

“I was going to say
sleeping
, Mrs. Yoder.”

He turned away from her, but not before she’d noticed how the lines had crinkled at the corners of his eyes.

He took off his coat and slung it over a peg where the sheep hooks hung when not in use. Although the night was cold, the crowded sheds were warm and they’d been working hard. He grabbed up a pitchfork now with his good hand and dumped hay into the feeding trough that ran along the back of the flighty ewe’s jug.

He hadn’t bothered to put on his vest when he’d dressed.
Beneath the thin, wash-worn flannel of Ben’s shirt, she could see the muscles of his back and shoulders flexing as he worked. His black suspenders seemed to cling to those muscles, to move with them.

Plain men never wore suspenders.

She touched the middle of his back, above where the suspenders crossed. It was supposed to be a light, brief touch, meant only to get his attention. Yet like his suspenders, her hand seemed to cling there, and she felt the heat and hardness of his flesh.

He turned, slowly, so that her hand trailed for a moment across the width of his back before it fell to her side. “I’ve been meaning to thank you,” she said. “I don’t know how ever Benjo and I would be managing on our own tonight, without you.”

“I suspect your good neighbor and particular friend would’ve come hightailing it on over here, tripping over his own big feet in his rush to lend you a hand.”

“Noah doesn’t have big feet. Well, yes, he does. But you shouldn’t mock him. He’s a good man.”

The outsider said nothing. He stabbed the pitchfork back into the hay bale just as Benjo came into the sheds with a splashing bucket. The outsider took the bucket from the boy and set it inside the jug. The ewe immediately stuck her nose into the molasses-sweetened water.

“Besides,” Rachel said, “Noah’s probably having plenty of his own lambs to worry over just about now.”

She suddenly realized that MacDuff was whining at her. Benjo gripped her arm, and she turned. The boy was looking up at her with wide eyes. His throat worked, his tongue pushing so hard against his teeth that he was spitting.

She laid a gentling hand on his shoulder. “Hush, now, and take a breath. I’m listening.”

“Muh—Mem! Y-you know that old gappy-mouthed ewe? Huh—huh—her baby’s c-coming out all wrong!”

THE EWE LAY ON
the ground, quiet except for her contracting belly. Rachel could see only one tiny black hoof thrusting from her rear. Her water had broken some time ago. The music that Rachel felt, emanating in radiant waves with each hard shudder of her body, was like the wild and plaintive howl of a coyote. Yet as Rachel knelt in the straw, the ewe looked up at her with those serene eyes that had always made her seem such a gentle, wise old thing.

“You poor old dear. Your baby’s trying to come out all backwards, isn’t he?” She thrust her fingers through the ewe’s thick gray fleece, massaging her clenching belly. “I’m going to need to pull her,” she said to the outsider, who had squatted down alongside her. “Benjo, fetch me a bucket of water and some of that lye soap. And a piece of baling twine.”